Over the past 3 1/2 or so weeks I’ve been working on an entry for Tigsource’s Action52 Remake Compo. It’s been a blast. I’ve got a lot more stuff in my engine now (like sound, lua scripting and proper text rendering), and after this I am NEVER going to touch the OpenGL fixed function pipeline ever again. YEAH.

For those who got here by means other than the Tigsource forums, a bunch of indie game developers are remaking all 52 games of the pretty horrid Action52 for the original NES, with the exception that we’re trying to make them fun and finished this time around. I redid Dedant, an arena shooter with ants and spiders and what I assume are rocks being thrown around. Yawn. Needs MOAR ZOMBIES. Oh, it’s got those now? Sweet.

Over the past few months I’ve gotten quite a bit done on my game. Since reworking the animation system, I’ve more or less completely rewritten the rendering backend. The old one worked okay, but I was starting to run into some real problems, not the least of which was the fact that the rendering commands weren’t really abstracted, and so there was no way for me to break away from my reliance on OpenGL. That’s all been fixed now, and the actual code for device access sits in a separate layer from the scene logic.

More art has been done as well. I’ve got textures in, final models for the protagonist, some attacks and the basic generic monster.

I finished converting my animation keyframe tweening over from cosine interpolation to cubic tonight. The cosine interpolation actually looked fairly decent for the simpler animations, but any keyframe that didn’t have the animation curve change direction would get weird hiccups in it. The cubic interpolation takes care of that, and I now get silky smooth transitions regardless of what the derivative of the animation curve is doing sign-wise.